ESCAPOLOGY expert Steve Fletcher has told his Cherries team-mates to prepare for phase two of their survival mission.

Fletcher netted to put the seal on Cherries’ midweek win over Aldershot as Eddie Howe’s heroes edged out of the League Two drop zone.

But despite climbing out of the bottom two for the first time this season, Fletcher knows Cherries can ill afford to rest on their laurels.

The 36-year-old is a veteran of Cherries’ 1995 Great Escape when he collected the prestigious Daily Echo-Micky Cave supporters’ player-of-the-year award.

And Fletcher will be hoping to help Cherries take another step towards safety when they host League Two rivals Port Vale at Dean Court tomorrow (3pm).

He told the Daily Echo: “We’ve got to make sure complacency doesn’t set in and that’s the one thing Eddie will be drumming into the boys ahead of the Port Vale game.

“When we got to within a couple of points of safety after beating Dagenham, we said we couldn’t think we had done the hard work.

“It’s the same now and it would be foolish for anybody to think it’s going to be an easy passage between now and the end of the season.

“All we have done is complete stage one by moving out of the bottom two. Now we’ve got to complete stage two and carry it on and start pushing up the table.”

When Fletcher returned to Dean Court in January, Cherries were 10 points adrift of third-from-bottom Grimsby and had played a game more than the Mariners.

But his arrival sparked a turnaround of Herculean proportions, with Cherries claiming 17 points from a possible 27, including no fewer than five victories.

Fletcher added: “The last thing we want now is to have to go to Morecambe on the final day of the season needing a positive result to stay up.

“People probably would have bitten off your hand for that scenario when we were 10 or 12 points behind but it’s all changed since then.

“We knew clawing back 10 points would be a mammoth task but we also knew that three or four wins would put us right back in the mix.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are top or bottom of the table, you always rely on other results going in your favour. A few results may have gone our way but, more importantly, we’ve made sure we’ve got the wins as well.

“We’ve battled hard and the lads have been a credit to themselves. The supporters have stuck behind us and have been immense, both home and away.

“Expectation levels are on the increase because we’ve done well at home and won a few games recently.

“But it isn’t that easy and these things don’t just happen on their own. We’ve got to prepare well and Eddie and Jason are very meticulous in their preparation. We know all about the teams we are playing and we work on it in the days leading up to games.

“There will be no change. In fact, it will become even more important that we don’t slacken. If anybody thinks we’ve done it, we could easily be kicked in the teeth and we don’t want that to happen.”